Home Depot posted $47.9 billion in sales for its fiscal second quarter, up 5.7% from a year earlier, and told investors that shoppers taking on smaller projects, not big-ticket renovations, are what’s carrying the business right now, according to the company’s own second-quarter earnings release.
Comparable sales rose 1.7% company-wide and 1.3% in the United States. Net earnings came in at $4.8 billion, or $4.79 per diluted share; on an adjusted basis, diluted earnings per share were $4.92. Those numbers beat what Wall Street had penciled in, and the stock’s reaction reflected it.
Home Depot CFO Richard McPhail said in the release that “our second quarter results exceeded our expectations,” adding that “we saw broad based demand across the business as customers continued to engage in smaller projects.” Senior EVP Ann-Marie Campbell credited the company’s field teams for executing through what she called a “dynamic environment.”
The framing matters because it cuts against the assumption that a sluggish housing market drags the entire home-improvement sector down with it. Existing-home sales have stayed depressed for months as high mortgage rates keep would-be movers in place, which normally suppresses the whole-house remodels and additions that make up Home Depot’s biggest tickets. Instead, according to CNBC’s coverage of the earnings call, the company is leaning on Pro customers and a steady stream of smaller jobs (a new faucet, a fence repair, a bathroom refresh) to offset the drop-off in bigger discretionary spending.
Home Depot reaffirmed its full-year fiscal 2026 guidance rather than raising it: total sales growth of 2.5% to 4.5%, comparable sales growth of flat to 2.0%, and diluted EPS growth of flat to 4.0% off a $14.23 base. The company still plans to open around 15 new stores, hold gross margin near 33.1%, and keep capital expenditures at roughly 2.5% of total sales.
That restraint stood out to analysts covering the print. As Yahoo Finance noted, Home Depot beat forecasts even while describing the broader housing market as essentially frozen, a sign the company sees the smaller-project trend as durable rather than a one-quarter blip, though not durable enough yet to bet a guidance raise on it.
For homeowners, the read-through is fairly practical. The retailer that dominates the DIY aisle is explicitly building its near-term strategy around the kind of weekend-sized jobs most people actually do, rather than waiting for a wave of full remodels that hasn’t shown up yet.
